Sunshine Hart

Biography

Sunshine Hart was born Lucia Adams on July 6, 1886, in Vevay, Indiana. She would later claim that her father was a minister on an Indian reservation and that an Indian nurse gave her the nickname "Sunshine". After high school she started acting in stock companies and spent many years working in vaudeville using the stage "Miss Sunshine". She married Charles W. Hart, a machinist, in 1910 and had a daughter named Leora. At the age of thirty Sunshine made her film debut in the 1916 comedy short A Scoundrel's Toll. She continued to work on the stage and appeared in several of Jack White's Mermaid comedies. Producer Mack Sennett gave her a part in his 1924 short film Scarem Much and offered her a long term contract. She would go on to star in more than two dozen of Sennett's comedies including Crazy To Act, Hoboken To Hollywood, and Smith's Baby. Sunshine, who weighed more than 250 pounds, usually played funny mothers. She became a popular character actress and was often called a female Fatty Arbuckle. Despite her age and size she was always willing to do dangerous stunts if it got a laugh. She loved making films but she told an interviewer her main priority in life was raising her daughter. In 1927 she was cast as Mary Pickford's mother in My Best Girl. During filming she badly injured her foot when she fell doing an automobile stunt. Although she kept working she never fully recovered from this accident. She had a small role in the 1930 comedy Midnight Daddies. It would be her last film. Sunshine died on January 3, 1930 from heart failure. She was just forty-three years old. Sadly she had spent the last few weeks of her life bedridden. She was buried at Hollywood Forever cemetery in Los Angeles, California.